And much she has caused my sorrow;
Unless now she renew with her kindness that hue
Death will soon bid me “Good morrow.”
Death did soon bid poor Ross “good morrow” and in this song, like Michael Bruce, he sang his own elegy. How pathetically the poet cries in the prospect of death!—
If she were thus low, with what haste should I go
To ask how the maiden was faring:
Now short the delay till a mournful array
The brink of my grave will be bearing!
Ross is a poet of a high order, and one of the sweetest minstrels the Highlands have produced. Many of his songs are highly popular. The exquisite sweetness and finish of Ross appear in his praise of the “Highland Maid,” the first two stanzas of which are rendered as follows by Mr Angus Macphail, whose early death has been a loss to Gaelic literature:—